Drug-Addled Vietnam Drivel Wins National Book Award—Iraq Next?

Top novel National Book Award winner for 2007 is Tree of Smoke, that USA Today calls a “dark novel about the calamities of the Vietnam War." "Reading it feels like a careening journey into our national subconscious," the judges said.

That “subconscious” is not national, except among our literary and media elites.

Tree of Smoke author Denis Johnson was a drugged-out street-person in the ‘60’s, hardly a background qualifying him to pass judgment on the troops who served in Vietnam, or to be taken seriously by anyone with any sense, or sense of decency.

The Washington Post’s columnist on foreign affairs, David Ignatius, whose entire career has been within the media, without practical experience, wrote a glowing review of this 600-page novel. It is indicative of what passes for truthiness among these circles. Ignatius finds the drug-addled mind of Johnson as a realistic indicator of our troops’ minds in Vietnam, and guide to our troops’ minds in Iraq.

To write a fat novel about the Vietnam War nearly 35 years after it ended is an act of literary bravado. To do so as brilliantly as Denis Johnson has in Tree of Smoke is positively a miracle…. to its sheer ambition to be definitive for the Vietnam generation…. This is war as hallucination. It's a story of the decomposition and degradation of the characters and, by implication, Vietnam…. by the end he is a wild outcast running guns in Southeast Asia. "I quit working for the giant-size criminals," he says, "and started working for the medium size. Lousy hours and no fringe benefits, but the ethics are clearer."… "This isn't a war. It's a disease. A plague." That is one of the most powerful themes of the book: Vietnam fed a national craving. We couldn't get out, we couldn't stay in; the war was controlling us rather than the other way around. Johnson's skill in rendering the dialect of war was earned the hard way -- during the years in which he was, by his own account, a drug addict….

As a serious war novel, Tree of Smoke is implicitly a story about all wars. And a reader cannot travel this journey without thinking about America's current war in Iraq. Officers and politicians speak of the nobility of this war, as they do of all wars. But when you talk to soldiers in Baghdad or Anbar, you know that it is about surviving, counting down the days, believing in the people on your left and right rather than in the loftier mission statements that emanate from the Green Zone. And those are the lucky soldiers who stay sane. For the vulnerable ones, war takes away these human instincts of survival and replaces them with crazy ones….

Something similar must have happened with the mercifully few U.S. soldiers who were involved in America's worst moments in Iraq -- at Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places we will hear about later. They were damaged people -- addicted to war, feeding on it in a frenzy, being made crazy by it….

It's a war turned upside down. If we could hear the inner voices of soldiers in Ramadi and Baqubah, behind those wraparound shades they would be thinking about coming home. The decent ones, that is. Those corrupted by war would want to stay on forever, as do Johnson's unforgettable, war-deranged cast of characters.

I had a previous run-in with Ignatius regarding the major media’s failure to report for duty in Iraq for Iraq war reporting.

Tree of Smoke author Johnson says, in a 2003 interview, he can’t even manage to cash a check without his wife’s help.

Fourteen years of substance abuse may have affected the writer's mind, so he relies, like Ozzy [Osbourne], on a practical wife to keep him grounded. "Cindy handles all the finances. That's crucial," he says. Last December, for example, he went with her to cash one of his own royalty checks at the bank. "She showed the lady some ID, and I said, 'Shouldn't I show her my ID?' And she said, 'You don't have an account here.'"

Johnson’s wife picked up the National Book Award for him, as Johnson is currently in Iraq.

I’m sure he will find himself in much friendly company among other home-bound pundits like Ignatius and other writers and editors whose conception of Iraq and our troops was shaped by a misinformed myth adopted about Vietnam and our troops. Many such are writing new myths about Iraq and our troops, and are probably looking forward to validation of their imaginings from drug-addled Johnson.

My friend, Thomas Lipscomb (bio), is a Senior Fellow of the University of Southern California Annenberg Center For The Digital Future, was founding President of Times Books, magazine publisher, widely published investigative journalist, and much more.

Lipscomb offers his take on this and other National Book Awards:

As a publisher and editor who has had a number of the books I had published over the past 40 years win Pulitzers and National Book Awards, the 2007 NBA award to TREE OF SMOKE is part of a dismal pattern. While NBA winners 30 years ago were often best-sellers, practically none are at present. There is a reason for that. The prize committees have drifted farther and farther from any recognizable American roots.

When I went into publishing in the late 60s, there was little doubt that the prevailing left wing politics of the publishing and academic communities influenced the awarding of prizes. But there was also room for well-argued and written books that didn’t have to carry clear evidence that a politically correct catechism had been mastered by their authors.

But as time went on, evidence of the catechism has become more important in many cases than the excellence of the book. For example, the last book to win a nonfiction NBA about a Republican was more than a quarter century ago in the 1980 Edmund Morris THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT. Unless you count James Carroll’s 1996 AN AMERICAN REQUIEM (which also won the Lucian K. Truscott IV Ingrate Son Award), IF his CIA father was one of the rare GOPers in the CIA.

And there were no other winners on a Republican in the past 50 years and we don’t even need to go near the fiction list. And yet Republicans have held the presidency for the majority of that time. But the list of winners covers the predictable liberal waterfront, from the Great Depression, to FDR, LBJ, Civil Rights, Jefferson, Vietnam, etc., etc.

The problem with political correctness of right or left is that it makes everything so predictable, including literary awards. Talent, the most unpredictable thing of all, diminishes as a major factor in the award.

In the early days of printing in Roman Catholic countries the church’s fear of general literacy required the imprimatur of the local cardinal or bishop be included in a printed book to allow it to be legally sold in his community. Having freed literacy from one tyranny, we are heading back where we started.

And what could have been more predictable than that the coveted Bancroft Prize in History should be awarded to a work fraudulent on the face of it to anyone who wasn’t living in an academic cocoon, Michael Bellesiles ARMING AMERICA. Before someone spent 10 seconds actually checking Bellesiles research, his central thesis that guns were about as rare in colonial America as astolabes (hence there was no historical basis for the 2nd Amendment) seemed just plain loony to a normal American. There clearly were guns hanging over the fireplace of every American colonial hovel, not peace pipes. At least an embarrassed Columbia University revoked the prize in 2002.

Henri Stendal, as acerbic a critic of social climbers as ever lived, created a scene in which his young Sammy Glick was amazed to be given his first award and ribbon by his patron and employer, the Marquis de la Mole.
“But what did I do to earn it?” the young man asked, losing his cool totally.

The Marquis was vastly amused. “Awards, my boy, are not earned, They are bestowed.”

Many a veteran of shooting wars and literary wars can testify to that.

AND Homeless Druggie Chic Is “In”.

ADD IN more Ignatius drivel, this time on Israel.